For several years, I have published, and edited, and managed, a 14-blog strong consortium of blogs loosely called “The Boles Blogs Network” right here on WordPress.com. It was a great delight publishing all those blogs, but now that WordPress.com is bundling services for single blogs, it started to become clear to me that I needed to condense and consolidate my blogs in order to keep them not just alive, but thriving. Out of 14 blogs, I initially kept three blogs: Boles Blues, the newest and fastest growing, GO INSIDE Magazine, the first online entity that found great success in publication, and Urban Semiotic, the first blog I owned on WordPress.com.
Going from 14 to three blogs was an eye opener. Everything was faster to publish and articles were easier to find. As I began exploring the WordPress.com store, I saw a Pro Blogger bundle of services for $99.00USD per year and a “Business” class of service for $299.00USD a year. Here is what the WordPress.com Business bundle offers:
That Business bundle started me thinking I needed to condense even more from three blogs down to one. That way, instead of purchasing three Pro bundles for $100 a year, I could just buy one Business subscription for $300 and have the whole depth of what WordPress.com had to offer. I didn’t want to pay $900 for three Business bundles and I chuckled at the thought of shelling out $4,200.00USD per year for 14 blogs with the WordPress.com Business bundle!
I knew if I planned to condense everything back to into a single blog again, I wanted to be fair to all 14 blogs. Would all the blogs become “Boles Blues” or “Go Inside” or “Urban Semiotic” or something else? I decided to import all the blog content into a whole new blog — “Boles Blogs” — that would be based on the Urban Semiotic content and I would import all the Go Inside and Boles Blues articles and comments into the new blog URL.
The export and import process went well. Both Boles Blues and Go Inside had over 30MB of only post content, so I had to split up the export .XML files for importing into the new Boles Blogs because the import limit on WordPress.com is 15MB. Breaking up the blog exports created a categories problem for Dramatic Medicine, Carceral Nation and Scientific Aesthetic. Those categories lost all their associated content and each category replicated itself a hundred times over with zero articles. After lots of extra categories deleting, I was in business with Boles Blogs.
No articles or comments were lost in the blog change. If you do a Google search and the old blog links are provided, clicking on those URLs will forward you right here to the wanted content with the http://BolesBlogs.com URL active. If you have any links to our old blog URLs, you should update to the Boles Blogs URL just to be safe.
This morning, I paid for the WordPress.com Business bundle for Boles Blogs, and I am sheerly delighted! Take a look at the screenshot below to see what “Unlimited Storage Space” looks like in real time. I have always remotely called all my WP.com blog images from my private server, so that storage feature is not something I will likely use much, but it’s still fun to see it there.
One massive benefit of combining 14 blogs into one blog is the big bump in traffic.
Here are the stats for the first couple of days since all blogs became this Boles Blog and the forwarding DNS state for all the other blogs isn’t finished yet:
The main reason I paid for the Business bundle is because of this feature that now appears in my WordPress.com administrative area in the lower right corner of my screen: WordPress.com Live Chat support. If I have a problem, I can now find a live WordPress.com employee to get it fixed fast. I find that sort of access invaluable and worth every bit of every monetary byte.
Boles Blogs brings us back to the beginning for a new start and we have closed one circle to create an even larger, and grander, circle of inclusion and information — and this is yet another great beginning along a wide and brighter path forward. Oh, and if you “liked” any of our previously published articles, you’ll need to go back and “re-like” them because Likes do not stick around after importing blog content from another blog. You may also need to “re-Follow” us, too, on WordPress.com. Here’s our new RSS feed URL: http://BolesBlogs.com/feed/